The topic is basically the definition of financial risk, which results in high variation in returns. And since I've been watching a lot of finance videos during the long break when I did not write any posts, I can say with confidence that this risk in public companies according to CAPM, is due to market risk, operating leverage and financial leverage!
Anyway the topic isn't about finance and is about difficulty in video games. Recently, i.e in roughly the past decade we've seen a lot of relatively difficult video games being succesful and difficult video games have definitely gathered huge audience. And this is not in comparison to the games that came out in the 80s and early 90s especialy on consoles that were really difficult but more with the 95-2005 games which are probably the easiest of the lot. Bioshock was more difficult than the average shooter on hard, even on medium difficulty. Recently we've had both indie games like Super Meat Boy, Braid, Minecraft (in a league of it's own), Limbo and Hotline Miami (not very difficult, but you'll die a few hundred times for sure) as well as a few mainstream ones like Demon Souls and Dark Souls. Dark Souls is one of the few mainstream games to have had difficulty as a USP (although the game is technically impressive, too)- the 2 parts of the game have each sold millions of copies and Dark Souls 1 is one of the most played games on Games For Windows. Now I'm not saying that older games weren't difficult- God of War, Devil May Cry 3 etc. being examples, but they didn't get so much attention from this big an audience.To give you a fair idea of the average difficulty in a game, that would be a game like Mass Effect 2- which requires some effort, but can easily be finished by an experienced gamers putting in effort without dying in game more than say, 10 times.
So why is there so much demand for games that are tedious to master, and kill you over and over again? The title of this post explains it in a way- people who have more time on their hands to waste, can spend more time learning games and this results in more rewarding experiences. Someone who plays Skyrim at a high difficulty setting (the default setting "Adept" is extremely easy, btw) can enjoy a highly immersive experience and really feel the thrill of finding new equipment or defeating new monsters higher highs. The lows of course mean that dying will be common but then I'm pretty sure that the highs are raised higher than the lows are lowered. Morrowind had a ridiculous journal system which only described in words where you had to go to and the things you had to do to complete quests, as compared to the pointer in Skyrim which always led you to the right place. The journal was enormous and easily exceeded hundreds of pages- out of which you could not even know which ones were completed (although mods and patches take care of this partially). Needless to say, Morrowind has enjoyed huge popularity in the last decade and is regarded by many as the best in the series! (and at worst 2nd best, after Skyrim).
People having more time on their hands could be partly because of new gamers coming in and making the community larger- thus resulting in the veteran gamers wanting to seem more 'hardcore'. This has always been a phenomenon and games with ultra hard learning curves like DotA have had highly intelligent communities (which at one point included me :P ). May be the same phenomenon became a bit more intense recently. Also, global unemployment has hit record levels in the past decade especially in some European countries and it has been pretty high in the US as well though it's come down in the last couple of years. People have literally been jobless. Difficult games which are indie provide a low cost alternative to AAA titles and can provide more content for less, and thus might provide an explanation for the huge boom seen in difficult indie games, although that seems to have died down as well in the past 2 years or so. 2009- 2010 was probably the peak and Super Meat Boy arguably came out at exactly the peak.
Focus on content and fair price of games has actually been a major dicussion point, even in gaming reviews. We don't see movie DVDs or song CDs being criticised because of high price, but this is common across all forums and major movie critics like Gamespot or Edge. RPGs have focused on replayability by choosing evil/good paths and also by choosing different character classes. The good/evil choice allowing for replayability is a very recent invention and probably started with Star Wars KotoR and was made even more famous by games like Fallout 3- while the classes have obviously existed for long, right from the tabletop days. But these days there are separate cut-scenes and dialogues for things like different people who are romanced ( not more than 1 can be romanced in a single playthrough and there are several potential romancees- male and female, depending on your sex) in the Mass Effect series, which takes replayability to something more than the experience of playing; rather it kind of 'unlocks' content for you. This replayability and the in-built complexity of RPGs as opposed to shooters, along with the graphical capabilities of newer PCs and consoles have made RPGs and especially action RPGs arguably the most popular gaming genre. Yes, Wii Sports and Sims and Call of Duty still exist but these are more like exceptions.
Coming back to the difficulty aspect, it is interesting how much effort people are willing to put into games, while they may not want to put a similar effort in real life. It certainly applies to me- I can spend several hours, days and weeks figuring out things in games while I lose patience after an hour if I'm trying to learn something. I can die a 100 times in Braid and still have more fun than reading learning material. In real life, there is a certain kind of happiness we get by achieving something that takes a lot of toil and effort. It's like games have found some way to make us put in this 'effort' by almost making the effort fun, and meanwhile it preserves most of the happiness we get when results are achieved. It's as if game developers are hacking our brains!
Anyway the topic isn't about finance and is about difficulty in video games. Recently, i.e in roughly the past decade we've seen a lot of relatively difficult video games being succesful and difficult video games have definitely gathered huge audience. And this is not in comparison to the games that came out in the 80s and early 90s especialy on consoles that were really difficult but more with the 95-2005 games which are probably the easiest of the lot. Bioshock was more difficult than the average shooter on hard, even on medium difficulty. Recently we've had both indie games like Super Meat Boy, Braid, Minecraft (in a league of it's own), Limbo and Hotline Miami (not very difficult, but you'll die a few hundred times for sure) as well as a few mainstream ones like Demon Souls and Dark Souls. Dark Souls is one of the few mainstream games to have had difficulty as a USP (although the game is technically impressive, too)- the 2 parts of the game have each sold millions of copies and Dark Souls 1 is one of the most played games on Games For Windows. Now I'm not saying that older games weren't difficult- God of War, Devil May Cry 3 etc. being examples, but they didn't get so much attention from this big an audience.To give you a fair idea of the average difficulty in a game, that would be a game like Mass Effect 2- which requires some effort, but can easily be finished by an experienced gamers putting in effort without dying in game more than say, 10 times.
So why is there so much demand for games that are tedious to master, and kill you over and over again? The title of this post explains it in a way- people who have more time on their hands to waste, can spend more time learning games and this results in more rewarding experiences. Someone who plays Skyrim at a high difficulty setting (the default setting "Adept" is extremely easy, btw) can enjoy a highly immersive experience and really feel the thrill of finding new equipment or defeating new monsters higher highs. The lows of course mean that dying will be common but then I'm pretty sure that the highs are raised higher than the lows are lowered. Morrowind had a ridiculous journal system which only described in words where you had to go to and the things you had to do to complete quests, as compared to the pointer in Skyrim which always led you to the right place. The journal was enormous and easily exceeded hundreds of pages- out of which you could not even know which ones were completed (although mods and patches take care of this partially). Needless to say, Morrowind has enjoyed huge popularity in the last decade and is regarded by many as the best in the series! (and at worst 2nd best, after Skyrim).
People having more time on their hands could be partly because of new gamers coming in and making the community larger- thus resulting in the veteran gamers wanting to seem more 'hardcore'. This has always been a phenomenon and games with ultra hard learning curves like DotA have had highly intelligent communities (which at one point included me :P ). May be the same phenomenon became a bit more intense recently. Also, global unemployment has hit record levels in the past decade especially in some European countries and it has been pretty high in the US as well though it's come down in the last couple of years. People have literally been jobless. Difficult games which are indie provide a low cost alternative to AAA titles and can provide more content for less, and thus might provide an explanation for the huge boom seen in difficult indie games, although that seems to have died down as well in the past 2 years or so. 2009- 2010 was probably the peak and Super Meat Boy arguably came out at exactly the peak.
Focus on content and fair price of games has actually been a major dicussion point, even in gaming reviews. We don't see movie DVDs or song CDs being criticised because of high price, but this is common across all forums and major movie critics like Gamespot or Edge. RPGs have focused on replayability by choosing evil/good paths and also by choosing different character classes. The good/evil choice allowing for replayability is a very recent invention and probably started with Star Wars KotoR and was made even more famous by games like Fallout 3- while the classes have obviously existed for long, right from the tabletop days. But these days there are separate cut-scenes and dialogues for things like different people who are romanced ( not more than 1 can be romanced in a single playthrough and there are several potential romancees- male and female, depending on your sex) in the Mass Effect series, which takes replayability to something more than the experience of playing; rather it kind of 'unlocks' content for you. This replayability and the in-built complexity of RPGs as opposed to shooters, along with the graphical capabilities of newer PCs and consoles have made RPGs and especially action RPGs arguably the most popular gaming genre. Yes, Wii Sports and Sims and Call of Duty still exist but these are more like exceptions.
Coming back to the difficulty aspect, it is interesting how much effort people are willing to put into games, while they may not want to put a similar effort in real life. It certainly applies to me- I can spend several hours, days and weeks figuring out things in games while I lose patience after an hour if I'm trying to learn something. I can die a 100 times in Braid and still have more fun than reading learning material. In real life, there is a certain kind of happiness we get by achieving something that takes a lot of toil and effort. It's like games have found some way to make us put in this 'effort' by almost making the effort fun, and meanwhile it preserves most of the happiness we get when results are achieved. It's as if game developers are hacking our brains!
